TenX, who is launching their highly anticipated ICO this coming Saturday has figured out how to solve one of the biggest problems for people that are involved in cryptocurrency — actually spending the currency. The worlds of entrepreneurship, cryptocurrency and Initial Coin Offerings are officially merged and entrepreneurs are raising 10s of millions of dollars to fund their companies. Bancor, Status and Basic Attention Token were prime examples of tokens/startups who collectively raised millions of dollars through ICOs. The problem TenX is solving and why their ICO will likely also do very well is that nobody can actually spend cryptocurrencies at 99% of businesses without having to wait days to exchange it through a centralized exchange bank into Fiat (government issued currency), or jump through other major hoops. TenX has built an iOS and Android app that serves as both a wallet and a decentralized fee free exchange, then adds a debit/credit card functionality on top of that to let you spend your cyrptocurrency anywhere you could use VISA or Mastercard. (They send you a physical card.) It also converts it to local currency, meaning it pretty much works in any country. As of right now TenX’s platform officially supports Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Dash, amongst others. Source: TenX Figured out How to Make Cryptocurrency Spendable Immediately In Real Life |...

This caught my #attention because it addresses the issue of how public, semi-public and private spaces will be delineated online as relates to offline situations. These are issues I feel the public does not think enough about. And still I wonder is it because people don’t care or that they don’t understand the complex array of implications flowing from these decisions. I won’t go to deeply into that here but for those that are interested in wading to the deep end of the pool….you can read my paper that touches on related aspects via the implications and possible fall out inadequate conceptual frameworks, and failure to consider that “Informed Consent” needs to evolve when so much is at stake for individuals who don’t adequately perceive the situation they are consenting to. Supreme Court decision is ‘a constitutional coming out party’ for social media On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that sex offenders can’t be broadly banned from using social media.The First Amendment ruling sets a precedent about denying access to social media sites and raises questions about their role as a public forum.The North Carolina law, established in 2008, made it illegal for registered sex offenders to use websites that minors also use. That included Facebook (FB, Tech30), Twitter (TWTR, Tech30) and many other popular sites….”This case is one of the first this court has taken to address the relationship between the First Amendment and the modern internet,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion, which struck down North Carolina’s law. In the opinion, Kennedy said the law was too broad and North Carolina did not prove why...

Reading this story my own reaction gave me pause. I agreed that this deal didn’t make sense if it the intention was to advance sustainability. I then wondered what the real agenda for the deal might have been… In the end it was a brief detour. That glimmer of cynicism is something I was saddened to have to witness but ultimately decided there was much to learn in the acknowledgement. And so back to the news item… Oslo airport’s 16,000km long biofuel controversy Oslo airport is using renewable jet fuel made from waste cooking oil as part of its fuel mix, but the fact this fuel is being imported from California has led to question marks about its real environmental credentials, according to Reuters.In 2016, Oslo became the first international airport to offer biofuels as part of the fuel mix it sells, with Los Angeles and Stockholm following soon after. This growing trend was part of an effort to lower the surging greenhouse gas emissions from the aviation industry.”This is a tiny little drop (in fossil jet fuel use). But it is the first drop,” said Olav Mosvold Larsen of state-owned Avinor, which runs 45 airports in Norway. He pointed out to Reuters that jet biofuels were twice the cost of conventional fuels.In the last few months Avinor has started importing its waste cooking oil from AltAir, a Californian firm whose sources include fast food restaurants. This means Avinor’s jet fuel is having to be trucked and shipped over 10,000 miles (16,000km). Previously, Avinor’s jet fuel came from Spain.Environmentalists say shipping biofuels from California to Norway doesn’t make sense....

Qubits, the unit of information used by quantum computers, make use of a phenomenon known as “superposition” wherein they can exist in two separate quantum states simultaneously. Theoretically, they’d enable computers to perform a variety of tasks far faster than conventional desktops by performing simultaneous computations in parallel. The problem is that qubits tend to be very unstable which prevents the information the contain from being read. However, a team of researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia may have finally tamed the elusive qubit. They’ve coerced one into remaining stable for ten times as long as normal qubits. “We have created a new quantum bit where the spin of a single electron is merged together with a strong electromagnetic field,” Arne Laucht, a Research Fellow at UNSW, said in a statement. “This quantum bit is more versatile and more long-lived than the electron alone, and will allow us to build more reliable quantum computers.” Source: https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/08/australians-researchers-have-built-a-better-qubit/ ...

Parent company Bytedance is aiming to buck a trend of slowdown in start-up invesment.The owner of Toutiao, a popular news aggregation app in China, is seeking a valuation of more than $10 billion, bucking a trend of slowing investment in the start-up industry, the Wall Street Journal reports.The app’s parent company, Beijing Bytedance Technology, seeks to raise about $1 billion in its latest round, according to the Journal. The fresh valuation marks rapid progress for the company, which was worth only $500 million in 2014.It also indicates an uptick in start-up backing; venture capital investment in the industry fell 14% to $24.1 billion globally in the third quarter, the Journal reports, the lowest for that quarter since 2014. Source: Owner of Chinese News Aggregator Toutiao Seeks $10 Billion...

Michael Taylor: New Paintings Nancy Sever Gallery, 4/6 Kennedy Street, Kingston Closes November 20, Wed-Sun, 11am-6pm Michael Taylor, who is fresh from acclaim at the survey exhibition of 50 years of his art at the Canberra Museum and Gallery that only closed last month, is now presenting a large new exhibition of recent paintings that have been executed over the past two years. Aged in his early 80s, Taylor remains compulsive, prolific and works with unbridled energy. This show is what could be termed an “unedited exhibition”, with a number of striking and very successful pieces – and a few that could be best left unexhibited. Compared with the exhibition that Taylor held in this gallery last year, in palette, mood and temperament this is a darker exhibition that favours murky blues and blacks with only a few rays of sunlight. He works primarily with dark colours on a light pink ground so that the forms frequently vibrate with nervous energy and dance across the surface of the painting, radiating with a halo-like appearance. Source: New works by Canberra region artist Michael Taylor at Nancy Sever Gallery show an enduring...